-
After Effects and playback hardware issue.
The Suck Up:
In my short but wonderful time on CC I have learned a lot, had my questions fully answered, quickly, and correctly by the wonderful members here, so I am back to post again…The Reason:
I would not post this issue, but I have had this problem (today in fact) and I have heard of at least one other person using AE who has had this issue… I’m not sure how good CC is at hardware but its a AE/codec/hardware/something insane issue so I thought I would give it a shot (see above “The Suck Up”)The Problem:
Well I guess I should just explain the work flow because the problem manifests itself during that process and I know there will be question about everything…So… I start with After Effects. I create a standard 720×480(.9) comp. I build a looping 1 minute animation. I render to uncompressed QuickTime. I put the quicktime.mov file to my external HDD. I plug the HDD into a Grass Valley Turbo playback device and it ingests it. Playback is now totally mangled, sometimes. 3 out of 4 ingests were fine. That 4th ingest though is totally mangled. (its not every 4 clips, but that’s about the ratio of good to bad)
Now… To fix this, we’ve come up with this:
After Effects project rendered the same. Put to the external HDD and moved to a Mac. Dump the file into a FCP sequence, and render it out with Compressor. This seems to work every time…However… If we use just Compressor to recompress the Quicktime, the Grass Valley Turbo will still mangle the ingest.
And here is the most interesting part, I think… once we’ve ingested a file that mangles on input, anything and everything on the Grass Valley Turbo is now mangled, and we have to Reset Media, and reload EVERYTHING…
Loading the mangled clips on multiple times results in different destruction of the video, sometimes its a couple re-arranged bands of pixels, sometimes totally mangled.
The Close:
I don’t know how much, if any, experience CC members have with the Grass Valley Turbo so I don’t know if CC can answer my question this time… Any help, brainstorming, or questions you have about anything I’ve posted, please feel free to ask.Thanks a ton!
Brian -
1 Reply
-
>>>Can you describe the term “mangled” in a bit more detail? That could mean anything from running off-speed, or heavily-artifacted, or bad color, to chopped up into 8-frame chunks and rearranged randomly.
***by mangled… well stuttering is the most common problem. We get bands of what seems to be slipped vertical pixels. Its hard to explain but its like the top 10% has slipped to the right by 50% of the width… the next 10% down is slipped by 40%, and so on down. The middle 50% seems to be ok, but then the lower area is artifacted, or just jumpy with no clear image at all. Wish I could get you a screen shot. Once a bad clip is loaded it makes all the good clips do bad things. Delete the offensive clip and the good ones play back fine again.
>>>The Turbo’s propoganda states that within the machine, it uses MPEG2 with bit rates ranging anywhere from 4-25 MB/S. What sort of files (QT, WMV, AVI, etc.) and just as importantly, what sort of codecs are you using to create the files that you ingest into the machine?
***We have found that 5mb/s is the easiest for the Turbo to take in. We have tried everything from default settings to tweaking out stuff we’re not even sure what it does in the MainConcept mpeg encoder option screen.
The codecs we have tried are:
none (uncompressed quicktime) from AE
H.264 .mov from AE
mpeg from AE
m2v mpeg from AE
its a windows based machine but it can’t play with .avi at all.
.mov, .moeg, .m2v/m2t are the file types we’ve tried.>>> Where does the conversion to MPEG2 take place?
***If I render my comp as a MPEG it mangles. If I render my comp as an uncompressed.mov it mangles. If I render my comp as an H.264.mov it mangles. All from AE…
If I take any of the same renders and run it through FCP or Premiere, it works… no problems.
AE uncompressed.mov -> FCP -> mpeg -> Turbo, works.
AE render to any file the Turbo recognizes to FCP/Premiere to any file Turbo recognizes, let the Turbo convert the MPEG, and it works. As long as it hits the NLE between AE and the Turbo it works…>>>As to training on the machine, did the Grass Valley rep just drop it off and tell you to figure it out?
***This is a box I work with quite often, though I/we have had limited training on it… Grass Valley’s support is not the best on this toy. I’ve tried calling Grass Valley, to try and get a work flow, codec, or ANYthing that would guarantee sucess, and they could not help me.
We have used them in many situations, and they always give us troubles of some kind. We’ve used a DNF controller, and multiple Turbo machines to feed a super widescreen blended projection system, 2304×768 pixel space. Three projectors of native res. 1024×768 onto a 3:1 ratio screen using full raster height. Feed the Turbo into a Barco Encore and run that out to the projectors. On that particular show we used the high-def (afterthought) capabilites of the Turbo. We use DoReMi V1U playback units as well. Those give us all kinds of other problems, mostly HDD crash related.
So far, the only machines I’ve been able to get to with AE are PC (I’m a PC user)… the FCP is a co-workers MacBookPro.
So AE render from comp = very good chance of problems. Take the comp render into FCP or MPEG StreamClip or Premiere Pro2 and then there is no issues with ingest.
<<
>> Anything else, or anything I can clear up more, please ask! Sorry it took me so long to post a reply after you posted… I’ve been backstage on this show all week with very limited cell/internet service. Drives me crazy! lol
Brian Lynn
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up